Grandma Mary

She is the grandparent I hardly knew, and for that I grieve. Not that I miss her, because that would be a lie. I hardly knew her. She died while I was a pre-schooler. I do not even remember her voice or her laughter.  But I do remember her scent. Maybe that’s because, as my mother Sonia tells me now, my Grandma Mary (Mayor) used to hold me to her breast when I was a baby.

I grieve for all that I had lost because I didn’t know her. The stories she would have told me. The loving strokes on the hair that every mother and grandmother seem to have mastered.

Last Sunday, Oct. 28, was Grandma Mary’s 40th death anniversary. In 1966, her third son Thomas (Uncle Buddy) was stabbed to death. He was able to crawl a distance to ask for help, but died hours later at the hospital due to massive blood loss.  At the time, human rights groups were non-existent and the practice in the hospital where my uncle died was for the relatives to buy or secure the blood first before they could give the victim a transfusion. By the time relatives got to the hospital (no cell phones then), Uncle Buddy was dying. “Hirap na hirap na ako,” he whispered to my Auntie Nellie, who was first to reach his bedside. He was 24.

Grandma Mary and her husband Grandpa Zario (Col. Nazario Mayor) were in Palawan when their son Buddy breathed his last. When they arrived in Manila, Uncle Buddy was already in the funeral parlor. My mom remembers that Grandma Mary cried quietly when she saw her dead son. My Auntie Nellie sobbed on her lap. But Grandma Mary never recovered from her son’s death. Soon after, she began to show symptoms of the incurable Lou Gehrig disease, which literally left her speechless. That’s why I don’t remember her voice.

She died the year after, in 1967, a mortally wounded mother. In a way, she, too, died of blood loss, for her heart was broken and never whole again.

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Grandma Mary was born in Palawan in 1906, when the island paradise was a new frontier. Her father Thomas Loudon, an Irish-American from Carbondale, Illinois, first set foot in Palawan during the Spanish-American War, right after the sinking of the battleship Maine. He was smitten by the island. After the war, he retired from the US army and settled in Palawan, where he obtained a logging concession. He met a lovely Spanish-Filipina named Cornelia Diaz and they had three lovely daughters — Mary my grandmother, Lulu and Nellie (after whom my Auntie Nellie was named).

During family gatherings, I would hear about the tragic story of my great-grandmother Cornelia and her baby Nellie.

According to records of the Supreme Court, which were later reviewed by the Arellano Law Foundation’s Lawphil project, this is what happened:

On the 10th day of December, 1913, the acting prosecuting attorney of the Province of Palawan filed a complaint against the said defendants, charging each of them with the crime of “robo con homicidio” in an armed band. The complaint alleged that on or about the 18th day of July, 1913, in the sitio of Delawan, within the jurisdiction of the settlement of Balabad, Province of Palawan, Philippine Islands, the above-named accused, in a band armed with deadly weapons intentionally, voluntarily, criminally, and for the purpose of stealing personal property, attacked the house of Loudon situated in the sitio of Delawan, and by use of violence and intimidation against-persons and force upon property with intent to gain, took possession of rice, clothing, jewelry, and other personal effects belonging to Loudon, to the total amount of P700; that in making said attack, said accused willfully, deliberately, and treachesrously (sic) assaulted Mrs. Cornelia Loudon, her baby named Nellie, Eusebio Quiron, Carlota Quiron, Esteban Cervantes, Alejo Diaz, Vicente CABONILLAS, and Simeon Maglumot, inflicting upon each of them several wounds, which caused their sudden and violent death...

It appears that Loudon and his wife, Cornelia, were out in the yard of their house when they saw the said Moros. Mrs. Loudon at once ran into the house. Loudon approached said Moros for the purpose of ascertaining what they desired. He at once noted their intimidating attitude and tried to escape to his house also, but was prevented by the intervention of said band. He thereupon escaped in the direction of the sea and was followed by a number of the band to the edge of the sea. Loudon, upon reaching the sea, entered and swam out some two miles distant from the shore to a place of safety.

On the following day, Loudon, with an expedition, returned to the house where his family had lived, and found his wife dead, with cuts across her back and with her arms cut into three or four separate pieces. He found his child, Nellie, also dead in her bed, with a cut at the base of the skull, and the left side of her face wholly cut off...

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In a letter to his sister, also named Nellie, Thomas Loudon wrote: The officer in charge went back with me the next day and we recovered the bodies of my wife and baby and took them to Balabac for burial. They were murdered with the deadly barong, a Moro fighting knife. Mrs. Loudon was cut almost to pieces. Baby Nellie was killed in her bed asleep and was not cut up so much... You will never know how she looked for we have not been able to get a picture of her. She lacked one day of fourteen months, had nice curly hair and weighed 26 pounds...I haven’t recovered sufficiently from the shock...

Mary, then seven years old, and her sister Lulu escaped the carnage because they were in school.

The realization that had Mary been home from school that day, I wouldn’t be here, writing this column, humbles me and sends chills up my spine.

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Grandma Mary survived the attack to be able to finish grade school and high school at the St. Theresa’s College in Manila. Her father then sent her to the States to meet his relatives and go to college. In the States, she joined a Filipino Community Club and fell in love with its president, Nazario Mayor.

Though in the land of her father’s birth, the land of milk and honey, Grandma Mary, a US citizen, decided to come home to the Philippines with her fiancé (in the land of blonde and blue eyed admirers, she still picks a true blue Pinoy from Romblon). According to my Auntie Nellie, her mother returned because she wanted to take care of her father Thomas Loudon, who was still in Palawan, and because she felt the Philippines was a better place to raise a family. Grandma Mary was the original balikbayan.

My dad Frank is the third of Mary and Zario’s eight children (Nellie, Bobby, Frank, Benny, Mary Anne, Coney, Buddy and Lorraine). He remembers his mother as a very pious woman who would gather her children twice a day to pray, especially during World War II.

My dad and Auntie Nellie echo each other when asked what they learned from their mother.

“Honesty!” was my dad’s immediate reply. “And also to be budget-conscious, clean and orderly!”

Grandma was a wiz in the kitchen, who could come up with gourmet dishes, cakes and pastries from a kerosene and gas-husk oven, recalls my Auntie Coney (named after her murdered Grandma Cornelia). But even better than her cooking prowess was the fact that by the time she served her culinary masterpieces, her maid-less kitchen would already be spic and span, “and all pots and pans washed,” recalls Auntie Nellie.

Her recipes, passed on to my aunts and my mother (who said Grandma Mary was the perfect mother-in-law) include Boston baked beans, apple pie, lemon meringue pie (which my dad still buys from Marie Callender’s in Anaheim, because it reminds him of his mother) and fried chicken and gravy (even before KFC came to these shores).

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I did not know you, Grandma Mary, but you live in me. And because of you and the day you escaped certain death, I know God has a master plan for all of us.

I never heard your voice, but your legacy speaks to me every day.

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 (You may e-mail me at [email protected])